Auditory feedback to compensate audible instructions to support people with visual impairment

Abstract

This work focuses on the use of adaptive sound feedback on mobile devices in mobility contexts characterized by external noise. The noise masks the device feedback, degrading the information it contains and preventing it from being fully perceived and understood. This leads to errors in the interaction with the device or requires the feedback to be repeated. Therefore compensation techniques are necessary in order to make the provided feedback audible and thus make the interaction with the device easier. As an initial research task, we experimented with compensation techniques on verbal information. Preliminary results indicate that increase in volume or adaptive equalization can improve the percentage of information understood without altering the intrusiveness of the compensated verbal instructions. Currently we are exploring similar compensation techniques for audio feedback based on sonification in order to make the information provided by modulating sound properties more understandable in a noisy context and thus enable reliable interaction with the user. For example, it would be desirable to apply effective compensations to instructions provided through sonification by turn-by-turn navigation assistants for people with visual impairments in order to make the navigation feasible in mobility contexts characterized by background noise.